Jesús Vegas

A graphical user interface for the retrieval of hierarchically structured documents

Past research has proved that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can significantly improve the effectiveness of the information access task. Our work is based on the consideration that structured document retrieval requires different user graphical interfaces from standard information retrieval. In structured document retrieval a GUI has to enable a user to query, browse retrieved documents, provide query refinement and relevance feedback based not only on full documents, but also on specific document parts in relation to the document structure. In this paper, we present a new GUI for structured document retrieval specifically designed for hierarchically structured documents. A user task-oriented evaluation has shown that the proposed interface provides the user with an intuitive and powerful set of tools for structured document searching, retrieved list navigation, and search refinement.

Context representation for web search results

Context has long been considered very useful to help the user assess the actual relevance of a document. In web searching, context can help assess the relevance of a web page by showing how the page is related to other pages in the same web site, for example. Such information is very difficult to convey and visualize in a user friendly way. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a graphical visualization tool aimed at helping users to determine the relevance of a web page by displaying the structure of the web site the page belongs to. The results of an initial evaluation suggest that this visualization technique helps the user navigate large web sites and find useful information in an effective way, without increasing the cognitive load of the user.

A model and a visual query language for structured text

We present a new model to query document databases by content and structure. The main merits of the model are: it allows rich structure in the documents; the query algebra is intuitive (moreover, complemented by a visual query language) and powerful; it is efficiently implementable; it can be built on top of a traditional indexing system or even with no index at all; it is strongly oriented to user-definable relevance ranking instead of boolean logic; and it allows flexible visualization of results in terms of structure, contents and highlighting of user-defined important parts in the query.

Reconstruction for 3D immersive virtual environments

The future of tele-conferencing is towards multi-party 3D Tele-Immersion (TI) and TI environments that can support realistic inter-personal communications and virtual interaction among participants. In this paper, we address two important issues, pertinent to TI environments. The paper focuses on techniques for the real-time, 3D reconstruction of moving humans from multiple Kinect devices. The off-line generation of real-life 3D scenes from visual data, captured by non-professional users is also addressed. Experimental results are provided that demonstrate the efficiency of the methods, along with an example of mixing real with virtual in a shared space.

A Graphical User Interface for Structured Document Retrieval

Structured document retrieval requires different user graphical interfaces from standard Information Retrieval. An Information Retrieval system dealing with structured documents has to enable a user to query, browse retrieved documents, provide query refinement and relevance feedback based not only on full documents, but also on specific document structural parts. In this paper, we present a new graphical user interface for structured document retrieval that provides the user with an intuitive and powerful set of tools for structured document searching, retrieved list navigation, and search refinement. We also present the results of a preliminary evaluation of the interface which highlights strengths and weaknesses of the current implementation and suggests directions of future work.

Extracting Geographic Context from the Web: GeoReferencing in MyMoSe

Many Web pages are clearly related to specific locations. Identifying this geographic focus is the cornerstone of the next generation of geographic context aware search services. This paper shows a multistage method for assigning a geographic focus to Web pages (GeoReferencing), using several heuristics for toponym disambiguation and a scoring function for focus determination. We provide an experimental methodology for evaluating the accuracy of the system with Web pages in English and Spanish. Finally, we have obtained promising results, reaching an accuracy of over 70% with a town-level resolution.

Design of a graphical user interface for focussed retrieval of structured documents

Many document collections contain documents that have signiJicant structure. Structured document retrieval requires diferent models and interfaces from standard information Retrieval. An Information Retrieval system dealing with structured documents has to enable a user to query, browse retrieved documents, and provide query refinement and relevance feedback based not only on full documents but also on specific parts of them, according to their structure. Currently, very few IR systems enable such level of flexibility and interaction, because of limitations in indexing and retrieval models and in interfaces. In this papec we present the design of a new graphical user interface for structured document retrieval. This interface provides the user with an intuitive and yet powerful set of tools for structured document searching, retrieved list navigation, and search refinement.

Enhancing literary electronic books with logical structure: electronic work

Purpose – This paper aims to present the concept of electronic work, such as an e‐book integrator of concerns (logical structure, appearance and functionality), for representing literary texts available in electronic heterogeneous environments.Design/methodology/approach – From the generic description of an e‐book and the descriptive requirements of the BiDiLiC project, the concept of electronic work is presented. These requirements involve a descriptive markup policy (based on TEI‐Lite) which defines the texts logical structure and is used for integrating the other concerns associated with the text: functionality and appearance. Finally, the article presents an example showing the integration of the previous concepts to achieve a functional implementation of the electronic work.Findings – The electronic work covers the requirements of classic literary texts, while still allowing other types of texts to be represented easily. For this purpose, a robust logical structure based on TEI is defined, which off...

Automatic identification of light stop words for Persian information retrieval systems

Stop word identification is one of the most important tasks for many text processing applications such as information retrieval. Stop words occur too frequently in documents in a collection and do not contribute significantly to determining the context or information about the documents. These words are worthless as index terms and should be removed during indexing as well as before querying by an information retrieval system. In this paper, we propose an automatic aggregated methodology based on term frequency, normalized inverse document frequency and information model to extract the light stop words from Persian text. We define a ‘light stop word’ as a stop word that has few letters and is not a compound word. In the Persian language, a complete stop word list can be derived by combining the light stop words. The evaluation results, using a standard corpus, show a good percentage of coincidence between the Persian and English stop words and a significant improvement in the number of index terms. Specifically, the first 32 Persian light stop words have a great impact on the index size reduction and the set of stop words can reduce the number of index terms by about 27%.

Agile DL: Building a DELOS-Conformed Digital Library Using Agile Software Development

This paper describes a concrete partial implementation of the DELOS Reference Model to the particular field of manuscripts and incunabula, and how an agile software methodology, SCRUM, suits the evolutive nature of Digital Libraries, solving misunderstandings and lightening the underlying model.